New Working Groups for IETF-95?

Jari Arkko

IETF Chair

17 Feb 2016

Thinking of some new ideas that could be worked on by the IETF? This Friday, February 19th, 23:59 UTC is the deadline to submit proposals for what we call Bird-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions at IETF-95 in Buenos Aires.

BoFs are not the only form of adding work to the IETF program, of course. Existing working groups take smaller new pieces of work in their area of work all the time, and in clear cut cases working groups can created even without a BoF.

Our steering group, the IESG, will decide what BOFs are ready enough to go forward on February 26th. Some BoFs are intended to be, for now, discussion meetings. Others intend to lead to the creation of a working group, if the community feedback is positive.

The current proposals that we have include the following:

Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) – this proposal deals with long range low-power and lossy networks, many of which operating in license-exempt bands. Existing pilot deployments show promise, but the loose coupling with the Internet makes the device management and network operation complex and specific. As of today, there is little to no use of IETF technologies in LPWANs at large, and there is a need to evaluate their applicability.

Alternative Resolution Contexts for Internet Naming (ARCING). While the most common Internet names by far are those which are part of the domain name system, that set of names is not the whole. There are also independent naming and resolution contexts, such as inion routing or multicast DNS, Handles, and proprietary names such Twitter handles. This creates some ambiguities, and the proponents of this effort believe that the IETF should describe the architectural issue and document best practices for identifying alternative resolution contexts.

Babel routing protocol (BABEL) – this distance vector routing protocol has been described in detail in RFCs 6126 and 7557, which are both Experimental. The goal of this proposed BoF is to discuss whether it is necessary to create a standards track successor these RFCs, including discussing what technical topics need attention as part of advancement.

Limited Use of Remote Keys (LURK). Communication protocols like IPsec, SSH or TLS provide means to authenticate the remote peer. Authentication is based on the proof of ownership of a private key. Today, the deployment of services on the current Internet largely relies on multiple distributed instances of a service and CDNs. Can a service be offloaded to a CDN without giving the CDN also a complete control of a private key?

Alternatives to Content Classification for Operator Resource Deployment (ACCORD). This proposal focuses on the ability of radio-based mobile access networks to perform some traffic classification for the purposes of managing radio resources efficiently, without exposing any privacy sensitive information. The increased use of TLS and other encrypted transports makes these types of classification attempts more difficult. This proposal suggests that it would be useful to examine both what specific network treatments need to be elicited for the efficient operation of radio access networks, if any, and what the minimal communication to elicit those treatments would be.